1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and method for entering data into an integrated circuit (IC) tester, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method for displaying wafer test results.
2. Related Art
Wafer testing is a real time application with many hardware dependencies. Accordingly, it takes a substantial amount of time to prepare the tester, and it is difficult to interrupt the tester once it is executing. Furthermore, a substantial amount of time is required to test each IC device (either a die on a wafer or a packaged part). Finally, there may be many dies on a wafer. Therefore, if many IC devices are being tested, then the user would generally want to monitor the progress of the testing.
A conventional approach which enables the user to do so is to print out summary results after testing the dies on each wafer. This enables the user to periodically observe the progress of testing. However, testing the die on a particular wafer requires a substantial amount of time. In many cases, if the user could observe the results more frequently, he or she could spot a problem in the silicon or in the test routine long before an entire wafer was tested. Often, there is no reason to continue testing if such a problem is present.
A second conventional approach is to enable the user to generate a summary of test results upon request. Although this enables the user to recognize problems which would obviate further testing prior to completion of the wafer, multiple requests of summaries during a wafer test would be tedious and time consuming.
Therefore, what is needed is a way to automatically present test results to the user during wafer testing without requiring the user to request the results.